


More Than Anything

by Sylvia_Locust



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s04e08 Wishful Thinking, Gen, Implied or Off-stage Rape/Non-con, Other, Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-21
Updated: 2013-02-21
Packaged: 2017-11-30 00:36:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/693331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sylvia_Locust/pseuds/Sylvia_Locust
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She keeps thinking she loves him more than anything. So why doesn't she remember him?</p>
            </blockquote>





	More Than Anything

Hope doesn’t remember much of her life before the age of 5, before she started kindergarten. Vague and probably inaccurate memories, colored in soft pastels—playing with her little brother after preschool, watching _I Love Lucy_ reruns in the afternoon while her mommy folded laundry. Running to the door to hug her daddy when he got home from work.

She always supposed that kind of forgetting was normal.

In middle school Hope took a wrong turn while skating through the park and thump-thunk-fell down 25 concrete steps, knocking the wind out of her and making everything go black for a short time. The next 30 seconds or so were completely gone, a yawning void, even though her friend Jordan swore she was talking to him right after her fall.

She was diagnosed with a mild concussion, and supposed that blanking out right after a knock to the head was normal too.

Once in college Hope drank so many red and green test tube shots at a Christmas party that she had only patchwork recollections the next day, like still photos instead of a running film—Janis shrieking with laughter, Heidy dirty dancing with the very flamboyant Matthew Wyatt, someone knocking into the tree and ornaments bouncing around on the floor. She would have sworn to her dying breath that she _never_ in her life danced on a table, except there was photographic proof to say otherwise.

She supposes that’s pretty typical too, at least amongst binge-drinking college students, and she learned her lesson with that. No more shots, no sir.

So the fact that Hope lost an _entire_ month of her life, swallowed up and tucked away in some inaccessible corner of her mind, is not sitting well with her.

_I was engaged?_ she asks Janis, wriggling the unfamiliar ring around on her finger before she finally takes it off and shoves it in a jewelry box.

_You seemed happy. I mean, we all thought it was kind of weird, but you swore up and down you loved him more than anything_. 

She calls her parents, and _what the hell, mom?_ she asks. Her mom laughs nervously.

_Your father and I were concerned honey, it was awfully fast and you never talked about the Mondale boy before. But you told us again and again that you loved him more than anything._

No one asks any follow-up questions, and Hope thinks everyone wants her to just move on, like this is something normal. Like she didn’t get fired because she was too in love to go to work.

Too in love with a man she can’t _remember_.

Hope Lynn Casey does not get fired, has never been fired, and the shame of it scalds her.

It was a very strange few weeks, everyone she talks to agrees. A woman at her gym swears up and down she saw a ghost, and Janis tells her that the parents of one of her third graders up and took off to Bali without a word to anyone. Also, Janis's very bald boyfriend woke up one morning with a broccoli-green mohawk.

Some of the people she talks to look a little shifty when she asks about those weeks, and some share Hope’s confusion with a shrug. It's a strange world, Mrs. Armstrong says philosophically.

The few memories she has are hazy and insubstantial, and when she tries to remember they drift out of her grasp like smoke.

_There was a man she never noticed, incandescent with love for her. There was kissing him, a man she loves with all her heart, though does not recognize him. And there was taking him into her mouth, saying_ I love you so much baby, more than anything, anything, _his happiness a balm to her fractured mind and her desperate, deadly love. His joy settled over her like a blanket, safe and also suffocating._

_There was lightning in a cloudless sky, scent of ozone making her split ends stand up like charmed snakes._

_There was a dead man, tennis shoes smoking in the road (and holy shit did I do that?)_

_And when the scales fell from her eyes, she was at Chin's, where she'd eaten dinner every Wednesday night since she was twelve._

_And then there was just Hope._

_Do I know you? she asked the strange man, and then she started down the street, trying to remember the way home._


End file.
